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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Apps / Circular reference bet...
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Circular reference between properties on unconnected fields

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Posted on by 4

Hi,

 

Hope someone can shed some light on this.  I'm currently building forms for a SharePoint list called Feedback.  In the Feedback create form, there is a choice field that allows the user to select a category (field value is called CategoryValue).  Once that category is selected, a ComboBox(FAQs) displays a filtered list of FAQs from a second SharePoint list where the category in CategoryValue matches the Category value in the second List called KnowledgeBase.  This works perfectly!  I used a ComboBox because I could not get this filtered list to work on a dropdown list control.

 

The problem is that the user needs to select CategoryValue2, and then something from the FAQs combobox if it applies.  This value should then be written into the text field called "Form_Detail" which has no dependencies.  If no value is selected in the FAQ ComboBox, they can freeform the field "FAQ_Detail".   When I, however, set the value of  to Form_Detail to FAQ.selected.Detail, I am getting a circular reference error.  These three controls have no dependencies or relationships to any other controls or fields in the form and it's driving me mad.  

 

The only custom properties for the three controls are:

CategoryValue - items = Choices([@'Feedback'].Category)

FAQ -                 items = Filter(KnowledgeBase, Category.Value = CategoryValue_2.Selected.Value)

FAQ_Detail -      items = FAQ.selected.Detail

 

As soon as I remove the reference to the FAQs ComboBox Value the error goes away but it doesn't work as we need it to.

 

Help? 

 

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  • Verified answer
    Drrickryp Profile Picture
    Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

    @CastleGarrett 

    Try changing the Choice type column to single line of text in SharePoint.  In the meantime, in PowerApps, you can control the choices offered to the User by putting them in a Dropdown control with the items property ["category1","category2","etc"].  Avoid using Lookup, Choice, yes/no and People type columns in SharePoint.  They are ok shortcuts in SharePoint but complicate things in PowerApps.  To see why, look at my blog post https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/News-Announcements/Relational-Database-Principles-and-PowerApps-Step-3-Keys-and/ba-p/188640 

    IMHO, single line of text, Date/Time and Number type columns are all that are really needed to handle almost every situation in PowerApps.

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